This essay derives from roundtable discussions of teams from seven research universities involved in a Knight Collaborative Engagement on Academic Indicators and Information Systems to Guide Resource Decisions. While colleges and universities are built on the premise that good data, well tested by an often adversarial process of discovery and…

One of a series of sixteen knowledge transformation papers, this paper deals with the nature and extent of use of evaluative data by administrators in vocational education. First, the following conditions which govern the use of the data are described: availability, reliability, credibility, utility, and consistency. Since the legitimacy of most…